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Atheism in Pop Culture: "Old Time Religion"

This one should be fun. In fact, I think we can make it into a contest.

It's the pagany folk nerd song parody of "Old Time Religion."

(You know. "Give me that old time religion/ Give me that old time religion/ Give me that old time religion/ It's good enough for me.")

I've loved this ever since I first heard it. Apart from just being silly and fun with many ridiculous rhymes, it's a neat reminder that Christianity really isn't "that old time religion" -- many religions are much, much older. And it has a nice, gentle, "making fun of everyone equally" quality that I'm very fond of.

Technically, I suppose it's not atheist. It's more "pagan/ disrespectful of organized religion." And technically I suppose it's not pop culture, either, unless you consider folk nerd song parodies to be pop culture. But I don't care. The subject of Druids came up at work the other day, and this verse popped into my head, and I decided I had to share with the rest of the class:

Let us worship like the Druids
Running naked through the woo-ids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
And that's good enough for me.

(Give me that old time religion, etc.)

There are about eight hundred thousand verses floating around in the folk nerd world and on the 'Net, but not all of them are gems. Here are a few that I'm particularly fond of:

Let us worship Aphrodite
In her silky see-through nightie
Though she's mean and somewhat flighty
She's good enough for me.

Let us sacrifice to Isis
She will help us in a crisis
And she hasn't raised her prices
And that's good enough for me.

Let us all bow down to Buddha
There's no other God who's cuter
Comes in copper, brass, and pewter
And that's good enough for me.

Let us travel to Valhalla
In Volkswagens, not Impalas
Singing "Deutschland Uber Alles"
And that's good enough for me.

Let us sacrifice to Kali
Let us worship her, by golly
To ignore her would be folly
And that's good enough for me.

Let us worship Zarathustra
Let us worship like we used to
I'm a Zarathustra booster
And that's good enough for me.

This next has always been my favorite:

Let us sacrifice to Loki
He's the old Norse god of chaos
Which is why this verse doesn't rhyme, or scan
And that's good enough for me.

And to show that it's an equal opportunity song parody, there are at least two verses on Christianity:

Let us all bow down to Mary
For she hasn't lost her cherry
And she cures the beri-beri
And that's good enough for me.

Let us worship like the Quakers
(silence)
(silence)
And that's good enough for me.

I wrote the next two myself:

Let us now form up a caucus
So that we may worship Bacchus
For his followers are raucous
And that's good enough for me.

(Alternate last line: "For his followers will fock us...")

Let us sacrifice to Hades
Looking spiffy in his shade-es
He's a devil with the ladies
And that's good enough for me.

My good friend Rebecca wrote this one:

There's a graven image of Ba'al
That I bought for my front ha'al
At the graven image ma'al
And that's good enough for me.

And my good friend Nosmo King wrote this verse, totally on the fly the first time he heard the song, earning the eternal admiration of all the drunken folk nerds at that particular party:

Let us walk the path of Tao
Though it hasn't got much wow
But it's in the here and now
And that's good enough for me.

So now it's your turn! At parties we keep singing the same ones again and again, and we need new ones. Plus we desperately need some from the atheist pantheon of made-up religions, and I'm having a hard time rhyming "flying spaghetti monster" and "invisible pink unicorn." (I'm about halfway there on Russell's Teapot -- something about "It's impossible to see, but" -- but so far I'm failing to come up with a last line.)

Text editors are religions, right? For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Emacs
Let's bow down to emacs' glory
Control-Meta don't be sorry
This OS won't cause you worry
and that's good enough for me!
Let us all use the vi
change the modes and don't ask why
make some emacs-users cry
and that's good enough for me!

The particularly subversive thing about the Loki verse is that it does scan. It's usually sung with the word "rhyme" extended over two beats, with a long pause after it to give the impression that the rhythm is awkward, but if you just take one beat for "rhyme" (which is, after all, only one syllable) and then plunge ahead with no pause, it scans just fine.

I love the Quaker one. Hadn't heard that before. And the Druid one is quite brilliant.

Oh mighty Greta, thou who with thy mighty powers of logic and clear-headedness doth shine light into even the darkest ways of ignorance and confusion, I bring further offerings to lay at your blogshrine.

Well I went to see the dragon
In the garage of Carl Sagan
But it hid behind a wagon -
Still, that's good enough for me

From Jehovah to Cthulhu
All the many gods that rule you
Now no longer will they fool you
And that's good enough for me!